The Return of Scribbled Chronicles

Years ago, when the word “blog” was not yet coined and “journal” sites were still manually edited, I had a modest set of pages called Scribbled Chronicles. It was a standard early-era personal online journal with random chronological topics, named after a reference to the Anglo-Saxon_Chronicles, a centuries-old chronological history of the Anglo-Saxons, from the Roman era through the Norman Conquest, copied through the ages the way everything was before the printing press–by hand.

Like the classic, my own “scribbled” chronicles were written through my own biases. But when software came along to make updating such sites easier, or lock portions behind “friends-only” walls, my old manually-created site inevitably faded to the dusty bins of the archives.

Skip ahead a number of years, and the Scribbled Chronicles are back, but with a new focus. A few of the early entries mentioned my genealogical research and certain headaches and found gems in that practice, and it’s time to bring my own part of that back online.

Genealogical records are after all, a widely dispersed, mostly hand-written chronology. Some of my own branches date back before the 19th-Century typewriter, before Gutenberg’s 15th-Century printing press, and even, though I can’t be certain thanks to a set of “missing” generations and some “dramatically-fictionalized” sagas, a possible link back to the same era as those classic 11th-Century-and-earlier Chronicles.

Here’s one example of the “scribbles” I run across in my lineage, in this case a chronological entry from Haram (Haramsøy), Norway, dated 1737, the last entry in a parish volume that spans 48 years. Most of the 90 pages are like that, some slightly easier, some worse, many faded with years and water damage in the meantime.

As I haven’t yet deciphered it to determine if this sample even mentions a relative directly, it’s not in my data. But somewhere in those nearly 50 years of pages, I know I have family. That volume will take a while.

So welcome to my own journeys through centuries of genealogical records and more recent researches of historical interest.